Fuzzy Logic and Temporal Information Applied to Video Quality Assessment (253-264)
        Carlos D.M. Regis, Jose V. de Miranda Cardoso, Italo de Pontes Oliveira, and Marcelo S. de Alencar
Video Quality Assessment (VQA) plays an important role for video communications systems and services, mainly to determine, accurately, the ratio between the provided quality and the resource demand. The objective VQA is a fast and viable methodology to determine the video quality for video service providers, although it presents an unsatisfactory correlation with the scores of quality given by the Human Visual System (HVS). The authors propose a novel \textit{full reference} objective video quality metric considering spatial and temporal analysis. The spatial analysis used an algorithm, based on fuzzy logic, to classify the regions in three components. Temporal analysis was performed by means of the perceptual weighted structural similarity index (PW-SSIM) between the frames that contained the differences of pixels in the same spatial position and in subsequent frames. To validate the proposed VQA algorithm, the correlation coefficients between the objective measures and the subjective scores provided by the LIVE Video Quality Database were computed, considering the following distortions: H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding and transmission of H.264 bit-streams over IP and wireless networks. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a competitive alternative when compared with the classical objective algorithms such as MOVIE.

Providing A Data Location Assurance Service for Cloud Storage Environments (265-286)
        A. Noman and C. Adams
In the cloud storage environment, the geographic location of the data has profound impacts on its privacy and security; it is due to the fact that the data stored on the cloud will be subject to the laws and regulations of the country where it is physically stored. This is one of the main reasons why companies that deal with sensitive data (e.g., health related data) cannot adopt cloud storage solutions. In order to ensure the rapid growth of cloud computing, we need a data location assurance solution which not only works for existing cloud storage environments but also influences those companies to adopt cloud storage solutions. In this paper, we present a Data Location Assurance Service (DLAS) solution for the well-known, honest-but-curious server model of the cloud storage environment; the proposed DLAS solution facilitates cloud users not only to give preferences regarding their data location but also to receive verifiable assurance about their data location from the Cloud Storage Provider (CSP). This paper also includes a detailed security and performance analysis of the proposed DLAS solution. Unlike other solutions, the DLAS solution allows a user to give a negative location preference regarding his/her data and works for CSPs (e.g., Windows Azure) that practice geo-replication of data (to ensure availability of data in case of natural disasters). Our proposed DLAS solution is based on cryptographic primitives such as zero knowledge sets protocol and ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption. According to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a non-geolocation based solution of this kind.